/m/bill_james

Reader Comments and Retorts

Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.

we did this in the atlantic league a couple of times...balls shipped from the factory in boxes of 10 doze, and we used to store them in a room that had no ventilation or a/c...so they would get hot, and (whether this is accurate or just me matching it to a story in my head) would definitely feel lighter than a similar box stored at room temp...normally we'd go through baseballs at a predictable rate, and move a box or two into the umpire's room a while before use, so the temperature would stabilize...sometimes though, we'd run through them more quickly than normal, and the best solution we came up with was to throw them in a walk in freezer for a while to try and quick-cool them...again, no scientific evidence that either made a huge difference...but it did seem to deaden the ball....I'll have to try that in my slow-pitch league - as a pitcher, I'll take whatever advantage I can get.

We’re not seeing DOMINANCE of pitchers the last three years; the major league ERA last year was barely under 4.00. In 1988 it was 3.71, in 1978 3.67, in 1968 2.98, in 1958 3.86. We’re merely drifting back TOWARD historically normal figures. We’re not even quite there yet. The banning of PEDs has a lot to do with it, yes.

Says the man who in his New Historical Baseball Abstract in 2001 wrote an essay listing all the factors responsible for the increase in offense in the 90s.

That there probably should be a mea culpa somewhere in the many posts of Bill James is probably the point. James was a rather ardent doubter of steroids for an extremely long time. If he is now at the point where he casually drops PED use as a reason for performance and has never walked back his previous statements it is a glaring ember of oopsie on his part.

Since run scoring only dipped slightly in the immediate years after testing started, it's pretty clear that steroids weren't a major effect, and if Bill James owes us an apology it's for the use of the words "major cause" just now.

Anybody else noticed that the high strike seems to be back in business a little more than during sillyball? It used to be you could go outside or inside a little bit, but otherwise you had to basically put it on a tee.

Talking about his Chicago White Sox days, McNertney said that Eddie Stanky always insisted there was only one excuse for not being in the lineup - if there was a bone showing. Stanky was also responsible for storing the baseballs in a cool, damp place. McNertney: "You had to wipe the mildew off the balls before the game. First you'd take them out of the boxes, which were all rotted away anyway, wipe the mildew off and put them in new boxes. Then you gave them to the umpires and they never suspected a thing."

The idea, of course, is that cold, damp baseballs don't travel as far as warm, dry baseballs, and the White Sox were not exactly sluggers.

That there probably should be a mea culpa somewhere in the many posts of Bill James is probably the point. James was a rather ardent doubter of steroids for an extremely long time. If he is now at the point where he casually drops PED use as a reason for performance and has never walked back his previous statements it is a glaring ember of oopsie on his part.

I'd be less interested in a mea culpa, and more interested in a discussion of how he came to his new position. I don't think a change in opnion is necessarily something to apologize for, but it does provide an opportunity to explore someone's thought processes.